Orange Crush

Maya's iphone buzzed on her nightstand, that insistent ping that pulled her from sleep at 2:47 AM. Groggy, she reached for it, expecting another spam text or group chat gone wild.

Instead, she found something that made her heart hammer against her ribs.

Her best friend Sophie had left her phone behind at Maya's house after their study session. Now, in the darkness of Maya's room, Sophie's iphone screen lit up with a message that shouldn't exist.

"Can't believe she hasn't figured it out yet. LOL."

From Liam. The same Liam who'd been flirting with Maya for weeks. The same Liam who'd asked her to homecoming yesterday.

Maya's fingers trembled. She knew she shouldn't look. She wasn't some creepy spy who went through other people's phones. But the orange notification bubbles kept multiplying like poison, each one a new betrayal. "She's so clueless," another read. "The bet was too easy."

The air in her room felt thick, suffocating. She'd thought this was real — her first real thing, her first maybe-love. Instead, she'd been a game.

The orange icon on Sophie's phone pulsed like a heartbeat. Sophie knew. The whole time Sophie had listened to Maya gush about Liam's smile and his texts and the way he looked at her in bio, Sophie had known it was all fake.

Maya threw the phone across her bed. It bounced off her orange fuzzy blanket and landed face-down.

At school on Monday, Sophie acted like everything was normal. "Did Liam text you?" she asked, grin stretching too wide. "He's so into you."

Maya looked at her best friend — really looked at her — and felt the ground beneath her shift. Some things, once broken, couldn't be fixed.

"Actually," Maya said, voice steady, "I think I'm done with that."

"What? Why?"

Maya just smiled. Some secrets weren't worth keeping. And some games weren't worth playing.

The orange notification light on her own phone blinked. New message from Liam. She swiped it away without reading.